


i feel it, too

by abeaufortinnewyork



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Jedi Rey, Senator Ben Solo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 06:41:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14279238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abeaufortinnewyork/pseuds/abeaufortinnewyork
Summary: drabbles from the senator/jedi verse. my inbox is always open over at @beautyandtheren on tumblr!





	1. masks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: ben and rey at a senate masquerade.

“You know, Senator,” drawls the Chancellor, his hand on Ben’s shoulder as he surveys the ballroom, “I think it’s high time you found a wife.”

“A wife?” Ben sputters. “I—erm, I don’t think my work allows the time for—”

“Nonsense!” he retorts. “Think of your mother! And Force knows your grandmother found enough time, even on the eve of the Clone Wars, to contract a secret marriage with a Jedi.”

Ben coughs loudly into his fist. 

“Now, I have a little project for you,” says the Chancellor, pausing and turning toward the edge of the room, where a solitary figure stands by the window. “Take a break from all your political talk and see if you can’t draw that lovely thing out of her shell. I can’t for the life of me tell who she is.”

Ben studies the young woman under the Chancellor’s finger. Her hair is drawn up in a magnificent array of twists; her mask feathered, long and mysterious over her face; her slim, athletic figure outlined by a delicate gown of blue-grey satin that clings to her tanned, freckled skin. He thinks dimly of Rey, and something like shame twinges in his chest, but he can’t resist approaching the mysterious creature who lurks in solitude at the edge of the floor.

“You know,” he says slowly, “you’re the only one here that the Chancellor didn’t recognize.”

“Am I?” she murmurs in response, tilting her head. “Then I’m only one who truly committed to the spirit of a masquerade.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose you are.” There’s something familiar in the curious yet mocking tilt of her head, the long, freckled slope of her neck—

“Do you dance, Senator?” she asks in a curt, clipped tone, drawing him sharply out of his reverie. 

He gulps. “Occasionally.”

“Well,” she answers, taking his hand, “I think this is as good an occasion as any.” 

They move to the middle of the floor, much to Ben’s chagrin, and begin a slow step as the music starts up. “You’ve trapped me in a waltz,” he mutters apprehensively.

“Don’t worry,” she responds, fingers tightening over his shoulder. “I’m a good teacher.”

Ben gulps, doubting her. But as they dance, he feels his uncertainty bleed out of him, and he moves lightly, dreamily, as if his feet are conveyed by the Force itself—

Suddenly it all comes together: her small, sinewed hand in his, the soft bow of her mouth, the Force light and almost gleeful around them. “Rey!” he hisses lowly, in shock. 

A half-smile shades her lips, and she murmurs, “I was beginning to think you weren’t as clever as they say, Ben Solo.”

Ben blinks, startled, and studies her eyes more closely, notices now the telling flecks of gold that swim in her green-brown irises. “But you—my uncle—I thought you were accompanying him to Ahch-To.”

“I was,” she responds. “We came back a day early, and I thought I’d come here to make sure you were safe. Discreetly, of course.” Her lips twist into a scowl. “It’s a good thing I did. Do you always dance with alluring strangers when I’m gone?”

“I—well,” he sputters defensively, “are you really going to blame me for that?”

She quirks an eyebrow. 

“You’re you,” he murmurs, cheeks heating. “Somehow, deep down, I sensed it.”

Her answering smile is soft, and it flashes as if with starlight. “I know.”

In time the music slows, and they draw closer together, there before half the Senate, and the wealthy banking classes of Hanna City, and all the richly dressed ambassadors and tradesmen from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. It sends a thrill of triumph through his blood, and his grip grows tighter around Rey’s waist. 

When the music draws to a close, Ben draws her off to the edge of the floor, lifts her hand to press a chaste kiss to her knuckles. But his eyes flicker up to hers, catch a mischievous spark in their shifting green irises, and he turns her hand to kiss her palm, now her wrist, now —

“Ben.”

“Hmm?” he hums into her forearm.

“People are staring,” she whispers.

“I know, Jedi,” he says, pulling her into his arms. “Thrilling, isn’t it?” Now he bends to kiss her, his lips a mere whisper — or maybe a promise — over hers. “I think you should come to masquerades more often.”


	2. in flagrante delicto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt... well... the title says it all! :)

It’s late in the afternoon, close to the magnificent golden hour of sunset, when Ben stands from his desk, his eyes lifting to where Rey meditates quietly in the corner. She senses his movement in the Force, cracks a single eye open in questioning. 

“Come here,” Ben says, and his voice is thick, firm.

Rey stands, tilting her chin proudly. “Would you care to ask more nicely, Senator?”

“Come here,” he repeats, in still firmer accents. The hurried “please” he adds thereafter is so desperate that it sounds like a parody of politeness. 

With a sigh, Rey crosses the room to where he stands, sidling between his body and the desk. Here she becomes acutely aware of how heavily he’s breathing, of the tendrils of purpose that curl off of him in the Force. “What do you want?” she asks lightly, but the words come out breathier than she’d intended.

In answer he offers only a wolfish smile, clutching her waist tightly in his hands and lifting her to the desk. His hands settle on her thighs, pushing them gently apart, and he steps forward so that his hips are cradled between them. 

“Ben, we can’t,” she whispers, but a tender, familiar heat is already coiling in her belly. 

His eyes are dark. “I think we can.”

“Here?”

He dips his head to her neck, kisses the tender spot just beneath her ear. Her toes curl in her boots. “Don’t you remember?” he breathes, his breath warm against her skin. “I’ve wanted this for a while.” Now he draws back, his hair falling into his eyes — but not enough to hide the wanting glint in his thinning irises. A single finger hooks under her chin, draws it up. “I think you have, too.”

At this she makes a soft, mewling sound, and Ben swallows it in a crushing kiss. Everything moves quickly now, their hands and bodies little more than panting blurs of want and need. His hands fly to her waist, swiftly undoing the clasps at her belt, and when her robes fall freely, parting around her torso, he groans against her mouth, dragging his hands up the warm, fluttering muscle of her abdomen. 

Rey hooks her legs around his hips, her fingers working furiously at his belt, now at the fastenings of his trousers. “Already,” she murmurs appreciatively when she takes him, hard and aching, into her hand, and grins in triumph when he chokes out a low groan.

Suddenly he leans forward onto the desk, supporting his weight on one tensed, sinewed arm, and sweeps the surface clear with another. Rey can’t help but gasp as the papers and pamphlets flutter chaotically to the floor, and her back hits the cool glass of the desktop. His hands move across her chest, pushing aside her robes to bare the desperate, shuddering heave of her breasts.  

“Force, Rey,” he mutters, his wide palms roaming reverently over her skin. She sighs, keening, and arches her back into his touch. 

But they are both too entranced in each other to hear the telling click of the door handle turning, the creak of the hinge, everything except the sudden ring of an unwelcome voice: “Senator Solo, I hoped—”

Rey gasps and flies up into Ben’s arms, hiding her face in his shoulder. Against her cheek and in the Force she feels the frenzied roar of his heartbeat. 

“Stars,” breathes the intruder, whose voice Rey does not recognize. “Is that—is that a Jedi?”

Now both of their heartbeats reach a furious thunder. 

“By the Maker, Solo, is that your _guard_?”

“It’s not,” Ben bites back. “Even if it were, it’s none of your concern.”

“The Jedi are meant to be celibate,” snaps the other man. “I’m sure Master Skywalker would wish to hear of this.”

In a sudden, almost blind rush of indignation, Rey gathers her robes together and turns in Ben’s arms, raising her arm and reaching through the Force to drink its power into her fingers. “You will forget what happened here,” she says coolly, her gaze leveled exactingly on the intruder — a red-cheeked, well-dressed Senator. “You will say nothing of what you saw. You will leave this room at once, and not return until tomorrow.”

“I will forget what happened here,” he repeats dumbly, blinking. “I will say nothing of what I saw.” Now he turns to the door, his movements stilted and mechanical as he opens it, passes mindlessly over the threshold, closes it behind him. “I will leave this room at once, and not return until tomorrow.” When he’s gone, Rey turns again, slinking her arms around Ben’s neck. Ben, for his part, wears an expression of unblinking, almost stupid awe.  

“Now,” she murmurs, threading the fingers of one hand through his hair, trailing the other down his stomach. At last his quickly-darkening eyes fall to hers, and she smiles, tugging her lower lip between her teeth. “Where were we?”


	3. i know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: rey is injured defending ben.

When it happens, it happens fast: a blur of action and feeling, and a sharp sear of pain in the Force. 

One moment he’s speaking on the famines in the Outer Rim, and the next Rey is flying in front of him, freezing a blaster bolt in mid-air through the Force. And the very next she’s hit by another bolt, this time from the opposite end of the chamber, and crumples to the ground at his feet. 

Chaos erupts throughout the chamber. But it blurs before Ben’s eyes, and hums weakly, emptily in his ears. In a disbelieving trance he sinks to his knees and gathers Rey’s limp body into his arms, rocking gently back onto his knees and forward again. Only when his hands go slick with the warm stream of red that bleeds from her stomach does a sudden frenzy overtake him, and his shoulders set to shaking, and hollow breaths chase out of his throat in gasping sobs.

“Rey,” he murmurs, half-crazed, his hands shaking as they clutch at her body. “Rey, oh, Force, please—” Now there are tears in his eyes, fast-beading and hot, and they pour down his face in a flood. 

He’s only dimly aware of the Chancellor’s guards’ entry into the pod. One kneels beside him, reaching for Rey’s lifeless figure, and begins, “Senator Solo—”

He flings up his hand, even feeling his fingers twitch with a distant, forgotten strength in the Force, and snarls, “Don’t touch her!”

“I won’t, Senator,” returns the guard calmly. “But your uncle wishes that she be conveyed at once to the Temple.”

“I can heal her,” he hisses frantically, reaching again into the Force. “I’m a Skywalker. I have the Force. I can do it!”

The guard sighs, presses, “Better to do it at the Temple.”

“No,” Ben counters, shaking, as the colors in his sight bleed into a kaleidoscopic chaos. “I can… I can do it. I have to save her.”

“Ben,” comes his uncle’s voice, sharp and arresting, and Ben looks up to find his figure outlined in blue, in a hologram above the guard’s wrist. “Bring her to the Temple. If you don’t, she will die.”  

A black pit of dread opens in his stomach. “All right,” he chokes out, looping his arms under her legs and chest and standing, nodding curtly toward the guard.

“The Temple.”

Ben carries her like a bride through the halls of the Senate, past crowds of his gaping, panicked colleagues, and into an emergency speeder. There a portable med droid cuts away her robes, revealing the smoldering, bleeding crater in her abdomen. At the sight of it Ben chokes down a sob, powerless to help her, and can only watch as the droid cleans the wound methodically, smearing it with bacta.

“A great deal of internal bleeding,” reports the droid tinnily. “The trauma is severe.”

Ben chews his lip, grasps her cooling hand desperately in his hand. He studies her face, tightens his grip around her limp fingers. And he hopes.

Luke meets them at the temple steps, accompanied by a small party of Jedi, brow furrowed with concern. Ben lays Rey’s body out across the stretcher beside his uncle, shakes out his tired arms. “She was engaged in a powerful communion with the Force when the bolt hit,” Luke says immediately, his hand hovering testingly over Rey’s head. “We’ll get her into surgery, but full recovery — full restoration of her power — will require some degree of Force healing. I can do it, but it might take awhile.”

“Can I help?”

His uncle smiles almost sadly. “Leave it to me.”

“But—”

“Ben.” Luke inclines his head.

Still he follows them, chest tight and throat dry, through the cavernous temple corridors. When they reach their destination, and the other knights wheel the stretcher into a shadowed med bay, Luke pauses, turning to face his nephew.  
“Stay out here,” he cautions. “The Force is a fickle mistress. Too many Force-sensitives might disturb its balance.”

“Please,” Ben hisses through gritted teeth. His uncle has nearly spoken again to dissuade him when he continues, his tone lower and scraping now, “Please don’t let her die.”

Luke sighs, eyes shimmering with a strange, knowing glow, and bows his head. “Trust me.”

The doors close in his face, and Ben Solo-Organa, blood of the Force, Senator of the New Republic, heir of Skywalker and royal prince of Alderaan and Naboo, has never felt more powerless.

\--

For hours, Ben waits by her bedside, massaging her cold, pale hand between his, willing warmth into her flesh, air into her lungs, life into her blood. And when at last, late at night and close to dawn, her eyes flutter open, something heavy shifts in his chest, and his heart itself seems to sigh with relief. 

“You’re alive,” she says simply, quietly.

Ben is at once acutely conscious of his brow furrowing, his eyelids fluttering open and closed, his heart thundering furiously in his chest. With a long, shuddering sigh, he leans over her pillow, his hand trailing shakily down her cheek. “Why did you do it?” he murmurs. It’s the first thing that comes to his mind, the thought that would have haunted him unto the _grave_ had she—

“You’re the last blood of Skywalker,” she whispers feebly. “The senator who would save the Republic. I am replaceable. You are not.”

“No,” he grits out, surprised at the tears that bead in his eyes. The words are almost harsh, sharp with feeling. “You are not replaceable to _me_.”

Rey laughs. Wounded and close to death, and she _laughs_. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says breathily.

“I’m not,” he answers, gathering her limp, boneless figure in his arms and lifting her torso from the bed. Her head lolls weakly backward, but he catches it in his hand, his fingers tensing against the back of her skull. “Rey, I _love_ you.”

“I know,” she whispers.

“What?” His trembling hand smoothes the sweat-slicked wisps of hair from her forehead.

At last her lips turn up in a smile. “I know. I feel it… feel you. In the Force.”

“Did _you_ know?” says Leia, watching them from the threshold, where the shifting shadows obscure her figure and her brother’s beside her.

Luke nods. “For a while now. Even before they did, I think.”

“And you’re not going to do anything about it?” Her tone is almost teasing.

Luke smiles slowly, turns his softening eyes to his sister’s. “The last time the council denied a Jedi as powerful as she is the chance to love, the galaxy burned for it. I think I’ll let them be.”


	4. in a hundred lifetimes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for the following prompt: could you write something where they're in an alternate universe from the one in the movies? and they see glimpses of the other universe?

Rey hates state dinners. 

This one, which fetes the arrival of a new trading partner from the Outer Rim, Ben hosts at his own apartment. By the time the guests have long overstayed their welcome, drinking and giggling into the wee hours of the morning, Rey finds her hand twitching toward the saber at her belt in frustration.

Even Ben’s diplomatic cordiality starts to wear thin, and soon he’s standing and loudly announcing his plans for an early morning, ushering his guests out the door with an abundance of forced _thank you_ ’s and _come again_ ’s. 

“I’m never hosting again,” he declares when the landing deck door is safely closed, and the guests’ speeder disappeared into the night. Suddenly a crease appears between his brows. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Looking at you like what?” Rey blushes. “I’m not looking at you like anything.”

“No, no,” he laughs, his voice dropping to a husky murmur as he moves toward her. “You have that glint in your eye.”

“Ben, it’s late,” she warns him, stepping backward. “You’re imagining things.”

All at once he lunges toward her, grabbing for her waist, and she barely eludes his grasp.

“Oh, I see,” he laughs, a languid smile crawling across his face. “You’re going to make me work for it, aren’t you?”

“Make you work for what?” she gasps, moving backward more quickly now.

When he lunges again she turns, streaking down the hall and laughing in spite of herself. “Ben! I want to go to bed.”

“All right,” he calls from behind her. Despite her training, he’s taller than her, stronger, and his long legs close the distance between them in several bounding strides. His chest is just opposite her back, close enough for her to feel the heat of his body, when he whispers, “We can go to bed.” 

“You’re a monster,” she gasps, breathless, as he catches her hips between his wide, splayed hands, dipping his head to mouth at her shoulder. 

But a sudden heaviness seeps into her conscious, weighing it with a distant burden, and the same words, in her own voice, echo sharply in her ears. The starlight-streaked hall turns to a swirl of snow, the red crackle of a bleeding lightsaber. 

“Ben,” she whispers, afraid. 

“It’s just us now,” he murmurs hotly into her ear, his hands sliding up the length of her torso. 

 _It’s just us now_ , he says in another world, another life, as the wind whips his dampening hair across his forehead. _Han Solo can’t save you._

“Ben, stop!” she cries now.

Startled, he releases her, his hands flying from her lips like mist from the sea. For a moment she loses her footing and stumbles forward, away from him, and a sudden, aching emptiness shudders through her flesh.  

“What—” he chokes out, voice breaking over the word.

The snow stings Rey’s skin, and she sinks to the floor, clutching her arms to her chest, willing out the cold, the darkness, the fear.

Ben moves swiftly to kneel beside her. At first his touch on her shoulder is tentative, unsure, but at the slightest turn of her chest toward his he folds his arms around her, dragging her flush against him. “Don’t be afraid,” he murmurs, fingers carding methodically, rhythmically through her hair.

 _Don’t be afraid_ , rings a distant voice. His. _I feel it, too._

_You’re not alone. Neither are you._

_Come back to me. I love you._

“You saw it, too?” Rey whispers, her shaking hands coming up to rest against his chest.

“Yes.”

“What—what was it?”

“I don’t know.” He swallows thickly. “A different — a different timeline. A different universe.”

“Where we were enemies,” she supplies weakly. 

“At first. But we—” Now his eyes cloud over, and Rey furrows her brow until she sees it, too: the warm glow of sunlight over a rocky, green- and gray-striped island, the two of them facing the sea, her thumb trailing softly over a thin line of scar tissue that cuts down his face. “We found our way to each other. Somehow.”

Rey reaches for his face, traces the path of a nonexistent — or maybe very real, but distant and faraway — scar down his cheek. “We’re good at that, I think,” she murmurs, and when his lips descend to hers, they’re heavy with the weight of a thousand galaxies.


End file.
